Option to not append results to Python Interactive

As part of my data science workflow I use the Python Interactive window as a REPL. That is, I run lines and then can interact with the Jupyter terminal to check data and figures. However, as the number of Jupyter cells grows the processing speed of each line declines. In some cases, when the number of cells exceeds 200 it takes a while to even process 1+1. To overcome this I restart the ipython kernel and remove all cells. However, I lose my variables and have to rerun all the variables I was working with.

After some searching, it appears there was an option to disable appending results to the window, but it is not available now.

"python.jupyter.appendResults": false,

It would be great to have this option available so the Python Interactive window acts more like a REPL than a notebook, at least until this issue is resolved #727. These features are necessary for efficient data science workflows – akine to Spyder and RStudio.

[rchiodo]

We’re re-purposing this issue to really just be about not appending. There’s interest in having the interactive window behave slightly more like a notebook in that a cell stays in the location it’s written to. This would essentially be - do not append unless a new cell is run - mode.

The perf related to that change should not be necessary once we fix some of our virtualization issues (and we’ll be doing separately).

[rchiodo]

It’s unlikely we’ll get to this.